october-2010

052
COVER STORY
GO MAGAZINE OCTOBER 2010
“I get
nervous and
frightened
before any
project.
I never quite
know if I’ll
be good
enough.”
humanizing: the occasional bout of stage fright. “Oh yes,
absolutely—yes!” she insists, laughing. “I’m always nervous before I
start a film, because you just never know; you’re being thrown into
a group of complete strangers, and you don’t know anybody and
you don’t know how they work. It’s nerve-racking. With experience,
you learn that there’s a rhythm to these things: You go to the
makeup trailer, and you go to the set, and you rehearse, and off
you go to do a scene. But I get nervous and frightened before any
project.” She pauses. “I never quite know if I’ll be good enough.”
Mirren’s humility is welcome, if wholly unexpected. She
exudes self-confidence both on- and off-screen, and she’s become
something of an unlikely sex symbol because of it. Last summer,
Mirren was artfully photographed topless in a bathtub for New
York magazine, and she’s undressed in several films, including
1979’s notoriously bawdy Caligula. In 2008, paparazzi pictures
of the star posing in a red-and-white bikini while on vacation in
Puglia, Italy, with her husband, director Taylor Hackford, caused a
global fuss. Looking composed, tanned and toned, Mirren exuded
palpable self-possession, and her enviable physique had men and
women equally transfixed.
But Hollywood isn’t known for its tolerance of aging, which
makes Mirren as much a pioneer as a pinup. But she admits she’s
looking forward to taking a break from the Hollywood hubbub
eventually, an idea that forms the emotional core of her newest
movie, Red. At first glance, the film—which co-stars Bruce Willis,
John Malkovich, Morgan Freeman and Mary-Louise Parker—is an
unexpected choice for the classically trained Mirren: It’s a gun-heavy
screwball action flick about a troop of retired, highly trained CIA
agents who are hunted for the secrets they took with them. But buried
beneath all the explosions and ammo reloads, the film is a story
about how difficult the transition into idleness can be for lifelong
workers, especially in an age in which so much of our self-definition
is tied up in our employment.
Mirren likes to think of growing older—and eventually retir-
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